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The Sabbath, Rebels, and Citizens
Presenter: Larry Kirkpatrick
Location: Mentone Seventh-day Adventist Church
Delivery: 2006-08-05
Publication: GreatControversy.org 2006-08-07 01:03Z
Type: Sermon
URL: http://www.greatcontroversy.org/gco/ser/kir-sabbathrebel.php
Depending upon your citizenship, you will obey the laws and principles of one government, or another. You will be a citizen of one world, or of another. In the eyes of one nation, you will be a rebel, the eyes of another, a patriot. In the eyes of one you will be a fool; in the eyes of another, a loyal son or daughter.
Every nation has its symbols. You would never tread on an American flag, or burn an American flag, because in attacking the national symbol, you are attacking the nation itself. America is a vast assemblage of people and parts. But if you attack part you attack the whole. You take down the World Trade Center and murder thousands of New Yorkers, then you are taking down a national symbol and murdering thousands of Americans—of my fellow Americans. You had better believe that you will pay a price.
God’s government has its symbols too. He has His citizens too. In the eyes of the world they will often be viewed as rebels.
Remember, there are two kinds of laws. Laws where God deals with man directly, and laws that a nation legitimately enforces. These laws loosely divide on the two tables of the Ten Commandments law. The first table includes the first four of the Ten Commandments: We are to have no other Gods before Him, not to worship graven images, not to take God’s name in vain, and we are to remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Those are the first four, the direct four. Man’s conscience is directly addressed.
The latter table of commandments, dealing with not murdering, committing adultery, stealing, or swearing, and other people related commandments, has been left to the state. This does not mean that every decision made by every state has God’s sanction. It just means that He will hold them accountable.
Rebellion Against Choking Thorns
To observe the Sabbath is to rebel against the cares of this world. They ever threaten to engulf us with their loud, persistent, cloying, attempts to shut out the light of heaven. The cares of this world are always ringing, ever buzzing, continuously calling, incessantly creeping, endlessly distracting. These unimportant consumers of time and energy just keep on presenting themselves as being more important than that which is spiritual. The clock is ticking and the demons know that every second we waste on their agendas is a second taken off of God’s agenda of spiritual growth for us.
The Sabbath is offensive to the thorn things because our very observance of it is a declaration that we do not share its valuation of the world, that we reject its view of reality. We say that time spent as God intended us to spend it is rightly spent, and that time spent on minutia of a world that is passing away is time wasted. To observe the Sabbath is more than a slap against the thorns. It is a decimating strike against them.
Somehow, the thorns relentlessly keep growing. They surround us and we forget the Sabbath. We keep observing it, but we no longer remember it as God asked us to in the Ten Commandments. Instead, one can lose the bigger picture, shrink the sabbath, and make it into a burdensome rite rather than a heart-warming truth. Isaiah 58:8-14 outlines what we have when we recover true Sabbath observance.
Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thine health shall spring forth speedily: and thy righteousness shall go before thee; the glory of the Lord shall be thy rereward. Then shalt thou call, and the Lord shall answer; thou shalt cry, and He shall say, Here I am. If thou take away from the midst of thee the yoke, the putting forth of the finger, and speaking vanity; and if thou draw out thy soul to the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted soul; then shall thy light rise in obscurity, and thy darkness be as the noon day: And the Lord shall guide thee continually, and satisfy thy soul in drought, and make fat thy bones: and thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not. And they that shall be of thee shall build the old waste places: thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations; and thou shalt be called, The repairer of the breach, The restorer of paths to dwell in. If thou turn away thy foot from the sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on My holy day; and call the sabbath a delight, the holy of the Lord, honourable; and shalt honour Him, not doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words: Then shalt thou delight thyself in the Lord; and I will cause thee to ride upon the high places of the earth, and feed thee with the heritage of Jacob thy father: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.
The true Sabbath makes us citizens of another kingdom, another world. If we let it truly permeate our lives, we will have light like the morning. If we take away from the midst of ourselves the artificiality of the thorny world, if we leave its hypocrasies behind us, we will talk to God and He will hear us.
True Sabbath-keeping will mean positive intervention in the lives of others. Those hungry for more life will be pointed toward it. The afflicted soul will find hope in Christ. We will build up the old waste places, together. Truths long having lain obscured will open before us.
The sabbath is irrevocably linked with reform, truth restoration. Truth restoration tends not to be high on the human agenda. Truth keeps coming at you, it makes demands upon you. Jesus said that every plant that His heavenly Father had not planted would have to be rooted up. He pointed to the propensity in man to replace true with the false. The false is always more appreciated by the natural heart. The false always strikes a compromise with our inclinations, substitutes a half-obedience with true obedience. Of course, half-obedience is no obedience. It is illusion.
But true Sabbath observance requires something. One must in action turn away their foot from transgressing God’s law. Our worldly pleasures conflict with God’s divine purpose for His holy day. Will we see the Sabbath as it really is? A delight? That which God regards as (and truly is), holy? And the sabbath is honorable. It can be kept. We can honor Him too, not settling for any half-obedience, but doing exactly what He says.
Our attitude needs to be settled on doing God’s truth wholeheartedly. Then the blessing that attends His truth will attend us. The very real benefits, intended for us, will be felt by us.
Rebellion Against Inhumanity
The Sabbath is more than a strike against the choking thorns of the world; it strikes a blow against inhumanity. The Sabbath says that we are special beings. Made in God’s image, we are made for the moral. To be serious about the moral means our getting close to the source of the moral. It means getting close to God. The Sabbath is the time that the Maker of the universe has marked out as His own and made for His purpose of making us holy.
And it came to pass, that He went through the corn fields on the sabbath day; and His disciples began, as they went, to pluck the ears of corn. And the Pharisees said unto Him, Behold, why do they on the sabbath day that which is not lawful? And He said unto them, Have ye never read what David did, when he had need, and was an hungred, he, and they that were with him? How he went into the house of God in the days of Abiathar the high priest, and did eat the showbread, which is not lawful to eat but for the priests, and gave also to them which were with him? And He said unto them, The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath: Therefore the Son of man is Lord also of the sabbath.
Across the stretch of time, the Sabbath lost its significance to the Jews. Satan worked to pervert the Sabbath. The Sabbath was surrounded with burdensome requirements. In the days of Christ the Sabbath had become so perverted that its observance reflected the character of selfish and arbitrary men rather than the character of the loving heavenly Father. The rabbis virtually represented God as giving laws which it was impossible for men to obey. They led the people to look upon God as a tyrant, and to think that the observance of the Sabbath, as He required it, made men hard-hearted and cruel. Jesus’ work was to clear away these misconceptions. He did not appear to be conforming to the requirements precisely because He was not conforming to the requirements. Of men. He went straight on to keep the Sabbath according to God’s requirements. He was as loyal as loyalty can be, a faithful citizen of the heavenly kingdom. But to the prominent Jewish teachers of that time, He was a rebel.
When Jesus declared Himself Lord of the Sabbath, He used the example of David eating the shewbread. This shewbread had been consecrated to holy use and was being taken down and replaced with new loaves. This was somewhat like our taking the left over communion bread and juice after a communion service and before it has been reverently disposed of, and letting it be taken by a passing worker we have known a long time who states that he is in the midst of doing God’s work. It was an uncommon event. But Jesus’ argument is, if it was right for David to satisfy his hunger by eating of the bread that had been set apart to a holy use, then it was right for the disciples to supply their need by plucking the grain upon the sacred hours of the Sabbath.
The many heartless rites that the Jewish authorities had burdened the Sabbath with could not replace its true purpose. The sacrifices were in themselves of no value. They were a means, and not an end. Their object was to direct men to the Savior, to bring them into harmony with God. When our service of love is lacking, the mere round of ceremony is an offense to God--even with the Sabbath. It was designed to bring men into communion with God; but if the mind is absorbed with wearisome rites, the object of the Sabbath was defeated. Its mere outward observance becomes a mockery.
Jesus is Lord of the Sabbath, its True Interpreter. The divine intellect is not so feeble as to design laws that men cannot keep. Jesus came to strip away the false understanding of the Sabbath. The Sabbath was not disposable; the false interpretation was.
The Sabbath says that people are important precisely because they are people; they are made in God’s likeness. Because they are people they are like God. because they are like God they need to spend time with Him. The Sabbath is one of those ways of spending close time with God.
If you spent all your free time with Mel Gibson, the law of beholding says that you would begin to be like Mel Gibson. When I spent some time in the South, before long I was saying “y’all” along with everyone else. How easily we take on the attributes and mannerisms of those we spend time with. The Sabbath is for spending time with God. It is for being with the divine, and for shaping our character after the divine. He helps us become more human. The Sabbath strikes a blow against inhumanity.
Rebellion Against Self and Sin
The Sabbath cuts against our own inward grain. In the midst of a busy week we choose to shut everything down, more or less exit the world, and switch to Garden of Eden mode. Our Sabbath today is, after all, not so different from that Adam and Eve experienced. We come apart from the world in measure. We cease our buying and selling and worrying about all our secular interactions. We set this time aside to spend in spiritual pursuits, studying the Bible, singing praise to our Maker, encouraging our brothers and sisters, sharing our faith with new guests we meet, listening and reacting to a sermon.
The self has no time to rest in Christ, to seek after God. There is too much partying and indulging to do, what are we waiting for? Sabbath puts on the brakes. It forces us to remember God’s original design for us. It runs exactly counter to our inclinations. Sabbath is like tithing; it cuts directly against our convenience. It shows our accountability to a power outside of ourselves. Nothing is more unwelcome to self than the true Sabbath.
The Sabbath marks God’s time, His law. To replace it is to prefer another character to God’s character. One who breaks Sabbath is choosing Barabbas rather then Yeshua. Bar Abbas means literally “son of the father.” Sunday is Bar Abbas day. Sabbath is Yeshua Son of God the Father’s day. God’s day stands for unselfishness and peace, the other day stands for me first and war against God. One day is Christian, the other day is Catholic, as in universal rebellion. It is kind of a willing rebellion, a confirmation that ignorance is more important than truth for most of its advocates.
To keep Sabbath is to acknowledge Jesus as Lord of the Sabbath. He is not Lord of Sunday; Benedict XVI is Lord of Sunday. To keep Sabbath is to rebel against Satan and sin. It is to stand for what is right even though the majority are ready to forsake you, to count you weird.
Consider the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20:8-11:
Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.
Fallen man tends to forget. Knowing this, God begins the Sabbath commandment first with the command that we remember. We are to keep the Sabbath holy. We are to view it as sacred in relation to other days. We are to treat it differently. God is Creator and Recreator. He blessed this day. He hallowed this day. It is His day. It stands in the middle of His law.
His law represents His character. Is there any defect in His character? No, but Satan would have us think so. If there is no defect, then there is no part of it that can be changed.
Satan is relentless. He is working relentlessly to destroy the last churches of the Reformation. Most of us here that teh Roman Catholic church cliams the power to change times and laws (Daniel 7:25), and indeed, claims as her special mark the changing of Christian worship from Sabbath to Sunday. She is the key change agent in this direction thyroughout all history. As Protestants, our principles differ from her own dramatically. In 1994, after many years of dialogue, most elements of the Lutheran Church signed a joint document with the Roman Catholic Church, called the “the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification,” which in essence agreed that the events surrounding the conflict of the Reformation had been due to a misunderstanding.
But the Catholics have not been sleeping. For long years they have been working. Just last week they signed on to the same document with the Catholics. The Methodists, with their many doctrinal similarities to Adventism, whom we might have hoped would one day join us in seeking to complete the work of Reformation, have instead been moving steadily toward Rome.
Four days before the end of the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI invited the ecumenical observers who had been present throughout the Council to an ecumenical service at the Basilica of St Paul Outside-the-Walls. Addressing the observers, Pope Paul spoke of having come into contact ‘with Christian treasures of great value’ in the Christian communities they represented, and expressed the hope that our differences could be resolved, in his words, ‘slowly, gradually, loyally, generously.’
When Pope Benedict met with representatives of the World Methodist Council in December of 2005, he alluded to the Speech of Pope Paul VI, noting that when we look back to the nearly 40 years of patient and persevering dialogue between Methodists and Catholics since the end of the Second Vatican Council, ‘there is much for which we can today give thanks.’
The dialogue has treated major themes of fundamental theology, including revelation and faith, tradition and teaching authority in the Church. Pope Benedict noted that while the dialogue reports have clearly identified ongoing areas of difference, they ‘have also demonstrated a considerable degree of convergence and are worthy of reflection and study.’
Along with many other ways in which Catholics and Methodists have come to know and appreciate one another, the dialogue has ‘allowed us to recognize together some of those ‘Christian treasures of great value’” in each other.
Indeed, the recognition of gifts in each other has increasingly come to characterize Methodist-Catholic relations, so much so that the forthcoming report of the International Methodist-Catholic Dialogue Commission, which will be released later this Spring, is entitled The Grace Given You in Christ: Catholics and Methodists Reflect Further on the Church. The title is taken from St Paul's first letter to the Corinthians (1:4), where he writes: ‘I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus.’
As the report relates, it has taken a long time for Methodists and Catholics to come to appreciate the gifts of the Holy Spirit in each other. In the mid-18th century, when John Wesley’s Methodist movement was spreading through England, Catholic Bishop Richard Challoner published A Caveat against the Methodists (1760), which argued that ‘Methodists are not the people of God: they are not true Gospel Christians: nor is their new-raised Society the true Church of Christ, or any part of it.’
John Wesley responded by agreeing with Challoner’s premise that the Church of Jesus Christ is universal, one, holy and orthodox, but retorted that he found it difficult to recognize these same marks of the Church in "the Church of Rome, in its present form".
Through the ecumenical movement—through dialogue, by joining in prayer and engaging in common mission—Catholics and Methodists have come to a new understanding of each other. Methodists see the Catholic Church as a true church and a means of grace for salvation; Catholics recognize Methodists as fellow Christians and Methodist churches as ecclesial communities in which the grace of salvation is present and operative.
The forthcoming statement of the dialogue commission offers a summing up of what has been jointly said in previous reports about the nature and mission of the Church, and proceeds to address ongoing areas of divergence by further developing a sacramental understanding of the Church. The text then asks what Catholics and Methodists can acknowledge to be truly of Christ and of the Gospel, and thereby of the Church, in the lived faith of each other; and proceeds to identify various ecclesial elements and endowments that might form part of a fruitful exchange of gifts between our two communions. It concludes by offering a number of specific proposals which could help Methodists and Catholics advance towards the full communion we seek (Joint International Methodist-Catholic Dialogue Commission, Statement by Rev. Donald Bolen, Methodist Catholic Relations 2006,
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/chrstuni/meth-council-docs/rc_pc_chrstuni_doc_20060125_bolen-methodists_en.html, accessed 2006-08-05 15:58Z).
Why are churches making these incremental agreements with Rome? They are seeking legitimacy, profoundly because they lack a sense of legitimacy. Rome offers them its supposed legitimacy, but in seeking it they are not only admitting their lack of it, they are self-destructing before our eyes. If Rome has legitimacy then Rome has authority. How much authority? Rome says it has authority to change the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday. Full communion with Rome—wait and see—will mean full acceptance of the authority of Rome. It will certainly mean full acceptance of the validity of Sunday observance over Sabbath observance.
By observing God’s true Sabbath, we are saying that the false sabbath is a lie. We are demonstrating that they are in rebellion against God, sinning. GCO
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